Why ‘No Hate Here’ Signs Are Actually Pretty Hateful
10th December 2018
Someone came up with the label “virtue signaling” to describe the psychological impulse behind these signs. The idea is that people who put them up want to tell you how noble they are. But that doesn’t sound right. Virtue-signalers aren’t in any way in doubt about their own virtue. What they really want to do is signal how depraved others are.
It’s about vice signaling, not virtue signaling.
This is the same impulse behind the prevalence of the Aggregation Fallacy in moralizing journalism. Whenever a proglodyte writer wrings ix hands over a situation and uses the words ‘we’ or ‘us’, ix is not really including ix in that collective, because obviously ix is sufficiently woke to See The Dystopian Reality; what is actually meant is ‘you’.
A couple of years back there used to be Fourth of July street picnics there. But the shindigs haven’t happened the last couple of years, and I don’t think I’ll see them again soon. Vice signaling breaks up communities, and there’s a lot of it today.
Yup. The SJW witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners doesn’t allow for rubbing elbows with the enemy.
Vice signaling is a defense mechanism, meant to displace liberal guilt. There was a moment, shortly after the 2016 election, when liberals realized that ordinary Americans had turned against them, and that they had reason to do so.
Denial is more than just a river in Egypt.